BBVA-Google first combined forecasts

Trend

BBVA and Google have issued their first forecasts on expected tourist numbers visiting Spain. The significance outside of the Spanish tourist trade is the new form of cloud analytics arising from the combination of external and internal data.

Banks have up till now used a certain amount of economic data in combination with their own data for forecasting. Card companies offer some purchase information by category also. This data has tended to be used in a relatively narrow way by the banks.

The Google-BBVA work takes this to a much more sophisticated level. Google's ability to bring search, booking and other payment data together with a bank's internal data has the potential to offer many market insights. It will allow banks to be cleverer with their own marketing and, as in the BBVA case, offer their clients more useful market information.

This approach will almost certainly become very popular globally in the future. It will no doubt spur other search engines, card organisations and booking organisations to offer trend data on a more professional basis. It is almost certainly the case that no other organisation has the breadth and depth of information as Google. Hence the sale of market trend information to organisations, financial or other, governments and other public bodies is likely to be a major future profit stream for Google.